The current health of Arena

Multiplayer Discussion
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For Magic the Gathering, my name once appeared on one of the first Top 100 lists in the world for Limited. I thought those skills would translate into me becoming an infinite Arena player, but that has yet to happen, but I still manage to play a lot of Arena.

Having recently made some posts about Arena in other threads, which were taken down, I thought I would rather respond to the following quote in a separate thread rather than in one about how Arena or HS is a Scam.

Basically, the abundance barcoders playing super-drafts, along with the amount of expert players good enough to contend with the super-drafts has driven most of the ordinary players out of Arena.

Arena is starting to improve slowly, but there are still an abundance of super-drafts for sale, which were drafted before the creation of the new algorithm, which is supposed to segregate barcodes into a pool where they only play other barcoders.

Pointers for telling barcoders from other types of Arena players:

1). Barcoders tend to use some of the common, lazy naming conventions used by bot accounts. They tend use the basic card back or a recently available card back, which is easily obtainable. They are playing unusually good decks—the kind you might see 1 out of 20 or more drafts.

2). Arena experts tend to signal their skill or experience by using golden hero portraits and the Legendary card back or some other difficult to obtain card back.

3). Try Hards like myself, who tend use a card back that looks cool or a random one, and who are good enough that they are not a complete push-over. They may or may use heroes with golden portraits. I tend to play more Arena on accounts other than my main one, and most of those do not have golden hero portraits yet.

Here are snapshots of 20 different recent Arena opponents. Can you deduce the barcoders from the other kinds of players?

https://imgur.com/a/xoT3hbS

https://imgur.com/a/55xvIbY

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its definitely not the players with the stock avatar, Asian character name, and the ones where you’re definitely losing.

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Wow that was among my first posts ever on this forum xDD

It’s not just that, but the mechanics and gameplay are also much harder than they used to be + the field is better on average than it used to be, so all of those in combination did it for me

I don’t play arena anymore, ever, it’s just not worth the time

It used to be fun, but now the games can be 40 min long, and I can’t stand that.

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Ya, while skimming through that thread, I missed that it had been necro’d.

I do not mind long games in Arena as long as there is interactive gameplay going on.

Despite Arena’s problems, the things I like about Arena are:

1). The drafting process.
2). The diversity of classes and the diversity of decks that can be encountered, which makes the format feel less stale to play than other formats.
3). The accessibility of the format for F2P accounts.

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There’s part of your problem. Myself I run the stock card back, even when I had the legend card back back when legend actually meant something. The reason is simple, you should never give your opponent more information to act on than is absolutely necessary. If your able to separate yourself from your ego you can do things like this, but it requires a lot of practice. Should your opponent mistake you for one of lower skill that is an immediate advantage.

But yes I don’t really understand posts about arena being broken. I thought that’s an established fact by now. The mechanism that broke arena is when Blizzard shut down their Asia/China servers and the culture around Botting and rejection sampling to create arena god drafts descended onto the NA servers. If you play arena now there’s a good chance you face many god drafts that are the result of infinite redraft attempts by players that pay real money to botters for in game gold.

Edit

I reread your post which I missed that you were discussing botter related players as barcoders, it appears you are aware of this and are discussing it deeper, ignore my reply as I lack any insight beyond what I wrote above.

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Ya, this is not lost on me. I used to do this in Arena and on the Ladder. Although the Legendary card back or say the season 1 card back can have an intimidation factor, which can impact nervous players.

I think there is advantage to using non-stock heroes, golden portraits, non-basic card backs, which is, it tends to help identify you as not being a barcoder or a bot—this may reduce the amount of times that you get reported as a bot into an automated reporting system. Players really hate botters and barcoders these days.

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I don’t see how it helps you much on ladder, since there is MMR. Though, it really shouldn’t matter at all. Psychology is a lot less effective online. We all know it can mean nothing, and there is no actual human presence. I generally feel quite detached from my opponent. Just mute them instantly and treat them like a robot.

Whatever advantage you think it gives you, I don’t think it makes up for having such a boring card back. =P
But hey, you do you.

Though, in Arena it might get you 1 win out of thousand. 10 thousand? Who knows. You could also be psyching yourself out by thinking you have some advantage.

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I just wish there was a more casual arena mode because I really want to play arena, but going against barcode accounts that could make my 150 gold worthless doesn’t feel good

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Keep in mind they also have curated the pool of cards. The average quality of cards in arena is much higher than it once was. You can basically end up drafting a deck that is near or at constructed level in arena now. The old drafting tool used to help you draft a superior deck but now it’s not as straight forward.

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I never even notice my opponents’ card backs

Heck, I don’t even know my own card backs

I watch the cards, not the cardbacks xD

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look at your deck to the right where you draw from Altair, it shows the back

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Yes, I know, thank you xD

I just don’t care, that’s all

I don’t care for portraits, neither, as long as they’re gold

I did like one or two new ones, like the DK dog, but meh, I don’t play because of aesthetics

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Druid seems to be in a good place in the current Arena meta. My best run of the week so far was with Druid:

https://imgur.com/a/89XWwHV

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I’ve continued to play a lot of Arena over the last two weeks while completing the current event with nine different collections, and it’s my conclusion that majority of players that I am facing in Arena right now are barcoders using super-drafts.

So I would say that devs attempt to segregate barcoders from normal Arena players is a failure so far. Why this is so, could be for a number of reasons.

1). Their algorithm may be quite terrible at detecting barcoders.

2). There may have been (and still are) a lot of of undetected bot accounts with super-drafts on the market, which may be grandfathered from being detected by the recent change.

3). Bot accounts may be farming only enough gold to retire a low amount of drafts, and then they are just abandoned if they fail to provide a super-draft, in order to still satisfy the barcode market.

I know it’s still very easy to buy barcode accounts and even “Legendary” accounts (with lots of gold).

For every account that gets banned, I wonder how many escape detection.

Players might ask me: if there are so many barcoders in Arena, then why do you play Arena? My answer is: I find arena matches provide more diversity, more interactive, and more dynamic play than other modes currently do. Overall, I feel like decisions matter more in Arena, making it one of the best modes, if wasn’t for the abundance of barcoders.

Below are screenshots of 20 recent Arena opponents. Can you spot some of the barcoders?

https://imgur.com/a/H8LrM5P

https://imgur.com/a/drDOsoE

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People play arena still?

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So as a reminder, back in April, they announced a matchmaking step, which is designed to segregate barcoders from normal Arena players:

I have been avoiding retiring bad drafts without playing them to see if that helped normal players to avoid having to play against barcoders, and since most of my opponents in Arena during the last two weeks have been barcoders, I would say that the matchmaking changes have not been very impactful so far.

With patch 30.0, the Arena format will change, triggering all previous drafts to end, so if old super-drafts were grandfathered from detection by the new matchmaking system, then new barcode drafts might be easier to detect and to segregate into a player pool of super-drafters. I am interested in seeing how this plays out after the new patch goes live for mobile devices.

“ Arena Updates

On July 16, with Patch 30.0, all ongoing Arena runs will end and a new Arena season will begin. To celebrate island-hopping tourism, dual-class Arena returns! During this season, curated draft pool buckets are out, and full expansions are back in. You will still only be offered one Legendary card, as the first card of your draft, and for this season class cards will appear about twice as often as before!

The eligible sets that will make up this Arena card pool are:

  • Core Set
  • Festival of Legends
  • TITANS
  • Showdown in the Badlands
  • Whizbang’s Workshop
  • Perils in Paradise”
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They can just lose 3 games on purpose instead of retiring a bad run, and avoid it that way

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I think the problem with arena is that the disparity between good cards and bad ones is so vast than you pretty much know grom the start whether or not the deck will be trash by looking at the legendary choices you’re offered.

I made recently 8 wuns run with hunter qnd 7 win run with shanan. But on average I’m on around 5 wins per run.

Plenty of loses werr just pure scams. Like I have full bowrd with hydra on it and the warrior who excavated once plays the brawler on 7 and he wins the brawl xD of course pure skill.

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Decisions matter in standard too. I think most noobs just think arena is superior because they suck in general.

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Sure, just another way of being able use super-drafts against normal drafters with less chance of detection or segregation.

Just look at the current leaderboards for Arena, and it’s plain to see that only bot accounts have the gold and time to amass enough runs in the first day of the new format to show up on the boards.

https://imgur.com/a/NdBpo0D

The leaderboard for Arena currently has only 24 players listed on it, and their win rates average from .03 to .76. So the current leaders all average less than 1 win per run.

Look over the current leaderboard list and notice the various naming conventions, which are used by these accounts.

This is just a reflection of the amount of badly balanced and designed cards that exist in the game. All formats are impacted by bad design these days.

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